How to make weird sound

Hey everyone,

When it comes to music production or sound design or anything sound related I have 0 knowledge. Nothing, Nada, Rien du tout.

For an enemy in my game and some ambient sounds, I want them to sound like a whale, but mechanical and distorted. A bit scary, a bit lonely. A bit like the mass effect reaper sound, but more sad and less explosive.

I imagine it could be done simply, with destroying the sample a bit ? But really it’s just imagination. I don’t know, I don’t even know what to search, because I don’t know.

Is there a way I could achieve this, and experiment but quickly and without too much efforts. Not because I am lazy (well a tad) but mostly because I have a deadline, and I don’t want to enter the rabbit hole of music/sound production and be nerdsnipped :')

For “destroying the sample”, it sounds like you’re looking for distortion. There are lots of ways to add distortion, but you could use a plugin like FL Studio’s Distructor to do that.

As for making the whale sound itself, if I were making the sound myself I would probably try playing around with the speed of recorded samples (especially mechanical/electronic samples, since that’s what you want it to sound like). You can be surprised by how well foley works or by how different a sound can feel when it’s played at a different speed or pitch.

You could also try making the sound in a synthesizer, but that requires quite a bit more knowledge about how sounds work. Synthesizers can be quite complicated!

Thanks for that answer!

I tried taking some satisfactory whale sample, and playing with Godot Bus, but their distortion effect was not satisfying. I should probably look into FL Studio but this is dangerous! What if I want to redo all the sounds effects ; - ;

I guess you’ll have to redo them and make them even better then c;

(also, moving this to General since it sounds like this is more of a discussion than a specific question)

I’ve used Sunvox for this; you can get a pretty wide variety of weird sounds just by stringing effects together.

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Damn it looks really cool. The UI looks like something you see from a 80’s movie (in a cool way).

I should really invest time to learn this >.<